A host of individual investors including media and entertainment industry professional Sunil Lulla also put money in the company, it said on Tuesday.

In a telephonic interaction with VCCircle, Nimit Bhavishi, co-founder of Happy2Refer, said the funds will be used for product development, marketing and sales, and customer acquisition.

“We have built a model that creates a viral win-win experience. If you work in pharma sales, you are best suited to understand a pharma sales job requirement. Further, you have the largest high-quality network in pharma sales. Ideally, you should be empowered to discover and refer great-fit people from your network and get rewarded if your referral makes it,” said Bhavishi.

He added that people can earn 20-30 per cent more of their annual salary from making the right referrals, which gives HR a pool of high-quality curated profiles to look at.

Launched in September 2015 by Nimit Bhavishi, Harshit Bavisi and Mitesh Jain, Happy2Refer works by filling job vacancies through employees and employee-initiated job referral chains. In other words, employees can start a job referral chain where passive referrers, who are not part of the organization, can also recommend a prospective candidate. The referred candidates are rated through a proprietary algorithm that can help the employer pick the suitable candidate from the applicants.

“Every person in the node of the referral chain gets incentivised. The company decides the rewards and we set the rules of the game when it comes to the reward programme,” said Bhavishi.

A mobile-first platform, Happy2Refer operates on an invite-only basis for companies. It will throw open its platform for other companies within six months and currently counts companies like Colgate, Religare Private Wealth, Shaadi.com and Zo Rooms, among others.

The startup is currently focusing on companies in Mumbai and plans to expand its services across Delhi and Bangalore.

Vinners is an early-stage investor group formed by top executives at prominent companies in India that include Narayan Prabhat Ranjan, CFO at Viacom 18; Gaurav Gupta, managing director at Macquarie Capital; Harvinderjit Singh Bhatia, CFO and director at Netmagic and co-founder at Radiowalla; Neeraj Jain, vice president at Johnson & Johnson; and Debasis Nandy, CFO at Thomas Cook.

Equity Crest is a Mumbai-based early-stage angel investor group founded by Amit Banka and Deepak Gupta.

Happy2Refer will compete with the likes of Delhi-based myrefers.com in this segment, where hiring is primarily through referrals.